


Beloved of Him, She Inherits Sorrow

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: Beloved of Him, She Inherits Sorrow [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestors, Ancestral Anthology 2015, I'm just going to borrow your headcanon - I'll put it back when I'm done, Just Kidding – Nuns Never Retire, Kick Ass Warrior Nun in Retirement Years, One of those stories wherein people mostly just talk, Philosophy, Summoner POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-19
Updated: 2015-07-19
Packaged: 2018-04-10 03:20:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4375229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Summoner tries to recruit this old lady olive as a symbol of the righteousness of his cause. She’s <em>probably</em> not senile and she <em>probably</em> can’t do too much damage even if she is or she takes a dislike to him, right? The Disciple has a few requirements of her own. </p>
            </blockquote>





	Beloved of Him, She Inherits Sorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Pseudonym](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Pseudonym/gifts).
  * Inspired by [My Kind Of Bitch](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4356098) by [roachpatrol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol). 



> This is not intended to be a sequel or to claim to be in the same verse, but I wanted to give credit where it is due for Disciple-background musings.

The olive, when your scouts report finding her, is old. As old as hills. As old as deserts. _As old as the Orphaner’s shriveled shameglobes_ , the third gleefully relates, before the first two dispense corporal dissuasion and instructions to _have some fucking respect_.

Of course she’s old, she doesn’t just remember, she _lived_ , through times that have since become both legendary and interdicted, at least to warmbloods. You have no doubt that an empire-sanctioned version of her story is taught to the coldbloods as a warning.

In her place, a teal might be aged now, but an indigo would still be young, a purple or violet a scarcely changed monster. Time does not touch your last enemy and seems as yet to fear her right hand. The Condesce and the Grand Highblood have been phantasms of sunterror for so many generations that they are each cultural institutions now, ones that you would see burned and buried.

In her place, a brown would be dead. 

You tried to send your quarry and potential ally a polite request to meet and she sends you back these three rueful messengers still smarting from strong ear-twists. They return with a note, signed not with a _sign_ , hers or his, but with a sketch, three trolls delivering a message, followed by two trolls sitting together and speaking without threat. She didn’t quite get the angle of your horns correct but each of your scouts' are spot on.

_If you would meet, you know where I am. I look forward to it._

Mindfang advises against going alone, but you’re going to a negotiation, not a fight. The Disciple may well be senile. It’s not a battle that needs reinforcements, at least not physically. You set out alone the next night. 

-

The moons are past halfway through their nightly procession when you enter a cave in a distant stretch of desert and scrubland. You call out softly. Something moves behind you, by the entrance, and you turn quickly, body already preparing for an ambush, hands twitching in the motion to equip your lance from walking stick to weapon.

You let the butt of it set back down.

The woman behind you is _old_. Her symmetrical horns are well tended, the graying sweep of her long thinning hair likewise, but her solemn face is lined with wrinkles. Laugh lines. Sorrow. Sun damage. She quirks a brow at you and then waits. Her eyes and her horns are just as pictured in the underground texts, just as illustrated in her message, even if the almost wicked sparkle of her gaze peers from out of a sea of wrinkles. This is the Disciple. You don’t know how she surprised you. She smiles, just faintly, a scarcely noticeable tectonic ripple among the tiny mountains and folded foothills of her facial topography, and says nothing.

For a moment you think of your wiggler self, and how once upon a time, injured, you did not die, because a Sufferist found you and fed you and guarded you until you were well, passed you on, and on again until you could fend for yourself. Your lusus was dead. You should have died. They didn’t even ask anything of you for it, except that you _be kind_.

You don’t know what they meant by that. When you take a beast for food, you kill it quickly. When you put down an enemy, you do the same. When you take a clademate, you are honest, going your separate ways before it goes sour. You’ve never betrayed someone first. You’ve never expected more than that of others. Those that follow you do so for a variety of reasons, but it mostly boils down to two. They believe in you. And they want revenge. You bind these two things tightly and know that they will police their fellows, seek recruits, _follow you into hell_ , so long as you do not falter. You will not falter.

You understand revenge, you finished off the lusus that injured yours and brought you to the attention of hunting subjugglators, finished their troll, then their clademates, one by one as they came for you sweeps after. A lusus for a lusus. They need not have died if only they had accepted that you did not start it. You understand revenge.

You don’t quite understand those who wear the irons. If they do it in defiance of the empress, why don’t they do more? And yet if you can prove yourself the active heir to the Sufferer's preachings... as _one_ , the warmbloods would be unstoppable. You _need_ the Disciple.

She doesn’t say anything, just waits, hands tucked into her opposite sleeves. You wonder if her claws are already equipped, if she’s changed her strifekind since The Suffering. Finally, you break the silence, done with waiting. You are not a wiggler. You are a rebel, and a leader. You have responsibilities.  

“I am the Summoner. My people and I are one. We are going to overthrow the old order, the cold order. The grubloaf of our labors as warmblooded brethren will be our own. Those that would enslave us will be enslaved or feed the fields from which we eat. Those that will ally with us will be spared. Will you join us?”

You extend a hand to her, palm up, fingers relaxed and unthreatening. 

You’ve run this scenario through your mind multiple times since you sent people looking for her. She doesn’t say any of the things you thought she might, agreement, disagreement, accusations of heresy or theft, any of the things for which you were prepared. She doesn't take your hand. 

“Who are you, really?” Her voice is hoarse, and a little flat, a bit of the deafness of age you think, but solid, slow, as if she doesn't feel the Handmaid's breath upon her and has all the time in the worlds. The question isn’t accusative. You try not to let yourself feel angry about it. You let your hand drop, slowly, to show that it is of your own will and not embarrassment. 

“I am the Summoner. I call beasts from the skies and seas and the very land itself. I am the lance of the warmbloods that will pierce the icy fortress of the coldblooded oligarchy. And I want you to be the flag of our victory.”

“No, not your title, young man, your _name_. When your lusus loved you and took responsibility for the fragile larval vessel of your young self, long before any dreams of your adult-self existed, for whom did they so care?” She tips her head and smiles at you, as if she were a lusus and not a troll, one of your Sufferist guardians fondly regarding a wiggler charge. 

Why do you feel so _small_ when she says that? Your lusus is dead. Your lusus is long dead and was only the first of many who rely upon you for vengeance. Your shoulders are still straight, your head steady. When you have horns like yours, the smallest waver is amplified and no creature on Alternia can afford to show weakness. You swallow, and when you reply, your voice doesn’t break because your cause is _just_ and you are going to _win_ this little old olive to you.

“Rufioh Nitram. My lusus called me Rufioh, of the sign Nitram.”

She looks at you and nods once, takes her hands from her sleeves and lets them rest by her sides. You can’t see any telltale glint of a blade. When she speaks, her voice is still… gentle.

“Signless didn’t want revenge. He wanted _equality_ , and he wanted it for all of us. He didn’t want to reverse the hemospectrum, he wanted to eliminate institutionalized castes. He saw it as criminal, a tool for the powerful to disenfranchise the masses. He saw it as a yoke that gave every one of us inherited enemies and took our freedom in return. He didn’t want to repeat the same crimes against different people. He saw _violence_ as a crime, not only against those we harm, but against ourselves. He didn’t want to leave anyone helpless, but he knew that we need to stop perpetuating the cycles that make strangers bitter enemies for generation cycles.”

Her voice is old, her face absolutely ancient, but she speaks with complete confidence, as if the world that the Sufferer envisioned is no stranger or further off than just over some mountain, or past some unexplored sea. You feel a sense of your own bitter fire in your gullet, like the taste of bile, not surprised, but still betrayed. Maybe you believed more in the Sufferer than you thought you did, even if you told yourself it was because of his defiance in the face of great odds, more than his message. You guess that one never really _escapes_ childhood indoctrination. 

“So you won’t help us?”

“I didn’t say that. I’m not Signless. I’m not the _Sufferer_ ,” and her mouth twists. You’re surprised at how much you suddenly empathize with her. For the first time you think of her as a _person_ , and not just a historical figure, somehow still present, a political strategy piece available to further your goals. You wonder what it feels like to share a deceased clademember with the world. How much of what you know of the Sufferer is true? How much is embellishment and appropriation, just like the rumors and propaganda about you? She continues as your view of it all shifts without your consent, a motionless lurch, a questing beast loosed of restraints.

“I’m not so _good_ as to be above revenge. But I have a price.” 

She looks fierce suddenly, a shift you cannot explain, only that you are reminded of the sweeps she fled security forces and certain death and lived, the sweeps when she herself grew into a legend. She is old, and for a moment you feel, bone deep, the danger of her if she decided you were a threat. For a moment you wonder if you could take her and are unsure. 

Of course you wonder what her price is, wonder if you can afford it, but she bulldozes on, arranging the next step in your attempted negotiations as if your cooperation is already granted.

“I think you should come in. Have some tea. I have a story to tell and I will further your own if you further mine.”

Your campaign, your _war_ against entrenched power is not a _story_ , except that it is. Sometimes the stronger story wins. In recruitment. In morale. The first frontier is the heart and mind, not the battlefield or raid. Not all your recruits are warmblooded, some bring clade, allies from across the unclear divide of blood. If you can have a teal intelligence officer, then it is not so terrible to share a purpose with your blue matesprit. If even Mindfang believes in your cause, it is not so strange for others to bring their indigo auspistice, their purple matesprit, their violet moirail. But pirates operate by a quaint meritocracy and her fleet lives in awe and terror of Aranea. You do not know how much you can trust those who betray their own blood castes.

Your host turns her back to you as she opens the hidden latch, as if she trusts you. She ducks through and you suddenly feel as if you should dash to catch up, like you don’t want to keep her waiting. You keep your tread measured as you follow. She smiles at you when you enter the darker hallway, as if you share some secret mischief, and she pushes the door shut and resets the locking mechanism.

“What should I call you? Disciple?”

She laughs and it’s surprisingly _young_.

“My name is Meulin of the sign Leijon. And if you’re coming to tea, you ought to know the trunkbeast in the room. My beloved was Kankri, of the given name Vantas, and though he died in pain, he also lived in hope.”

She reaches up, up, all the way to your face, rising to her toes to do so, perfectly balanced for all that she's so thin she looks like a breeze might upset her, and for just a moment she rests her palm and fingers against your cheek and stares into your eyes as if she can read you.

You don’t flinch. You don’t even think of preventing yourself from flinching. It’s just, _unthreatening_. Shockingly unthreatening, just like the Sufferists who fed and guarded wiggler-you so long ago, and strange, with a woman who moments previous seemed so dangerous. You feel calm, but not fuzzy like you’ve been papped. You didn’t even think of it as a pap any more than you thought of her talons on your cheekbone or her thumb so close to the tender tissues of your eyes and nose.

Her voice is so soft that you almost think you imagine it.

_“He told me that you would come, Rufioh. I almost thought it would be too late.”_

-

She leads you through tunnels that branch and branch again and you’ve been trying to keep track or find some identifying navigational aid, but will have to simply hope to not so upset her as to be left to find your own way out. You don’t feel any minds but those of a few burrowing insect colonies.

When the tunnels and several more false-walls-that-are-doors empty out, you find yourself in a cozy room full of tables and chairs and blankets and a food preparation section. It smells of strong tea and active but not scared wigglers, walls painted in greens and yellows and rusts and browns, but also blues and purples. You can't smell blood, but if the paintings are old enough, you wouldn't. You don’t get a chance to examine them more closely before she points you at one of the three other doors and tells you to refresh yourself as she makes tea. She never actually asks you if you want tea any more than she asks you if you need the refresher. It seems harmless enough to go along with what she wants, at least so far. The desert and scrublands are dry and even a flier expends enough energy to be parched, even, perhaps especially, with the additional speed granted by flight. And, well, there are other advantages to letting her take the lead. 

You close the door to a modern refresher and evaluate further proof that she’s hardly a primitive ascetic living on untanned hides. Electricity. Plumbing. Tea. Trade of some sort, for all the things in the room outside the door, who knows how many rooms besides. Someone else knows that she’s here, or someone else is here to make supply runs.

You refresh yourself, polish, shake, and comb travel dust off, and then you open the door to a changed room, full of two to six sweep old wigglers and another adult Meulin introduces as Sorrow.

Sorrow-with-no-sign is a green of Meulin’s color, well past middle-aged but nowhere approaching Meulin’s old-as-hills level of wrinkling. She has short hair and short unthreatening symmetric horns and what appears to be modest psionics, pouring tea by hand into a line of small thick ceramic drinking bowls and then pushing the filled bowls out by mind.

The wigglers scramble into chairs and Sorrow warns “ _be careful, it’s hot_ ”. One of the wigglers sticks their tongue in anyway and yelps, cries. Giggles break out down the table, but no one attacks the crying child. Sorrow swoops in and outright cuddles them, with a soft tease, _Oh my, if the burn is too bad, we’ll simply have to cut out your misbehaving tongue._ She snaps her teeth and the wiggler doesn’t so much as flinch, but _giggles_ at the threat display.

It is like observing an unknown species of herd animals. Where are the lusii? Where are the true threats? Where did these children in all the shades of the walls come from? Why are a violet and a brown sharing a chair as if they do not know that they will be enemies, that they _are_ enemies?

A part of your mind insists that all coldbloods are a threat and that it is better to deal with threats before they mature. Your hands fist and you regret leaning your lance in a corner when you saw wigglers first and color after.

You have never been a child killer and you don’t allow it in your warriors. Each warmblooded wiggler is a potential future recruit, a potential future betrayal. Each coldblooded wiggler is a potential future enemy, a potential future ally. If your fighters get used to killing the helpless, they’ll be good for little else. Your strength is your shared noble purpose, what keeps your people disciplined and self-policing, and it’s the only thing that that’s kept you from being officially discovered and executed, army scattered to the winds. The Condesce would love for you to so play into her hands. You must keep the moral high ground.

Meulin hands you a bowl of tea and speaks, so softly you doubt the wigglers can hear her.

“Kankri believed that every child was precious and deserved to live in safety, without fear, with access to clean water, nourishing food, and social interaction with other trolls. In time, Porrim, Mituna, and I came to feel the same. He never had the opportunity to provide to others the security that Porrim was able to give him as a child. Our life was too dangerous, too transient. Ironic, that I can do this for him only when he is no more.”

You look down at her and her face is not sad but solemn, perhaps even serene. The steam from your tea is fragrant, floral, something you don’t recognize, but it smells like the room. Meulin takes a sip of her bowl and you take a tiny sip of yours. She probably isn’t trying to poison you. Something in how she regards you makes you think she needs you as much as you need her.

The wigglers are making cases to Sorrow about how it would be a great injustice for her to possess cookies and not share them and she’s pretending to protest, distracting them with chains of logic and jumping to a new excuse whenever they nullify an argument. Some of them are half on the table pleading their collective, raucous case. A tea bowl drops and rolls, spilling tea but not breaking. The guilty child retrieves it reluctantly, as if the loss of water and tea leaves is no great hardship, but the distraction is an annoyance.

“Do you know what I was before I came to Signless?” The Disciple asks. You shake your head. The Disciple is a mystery. Where she came from, where she went, how she escaped so thoroughly. You know one part of it now, due to your scouts and what you can see here, but little else.

“I was a coursing hound, a willing slave, an illiterate innocent of any world but the one to which I was raised, the Church.”

You look at her with surprise because you can’t imagine a mind that insists on such unconventional thoughts as prioritizing wiggler socialization as ever being content in such a condition, but it is easy to grow accustomed to a great many things, if only one starts young enough. She explains, and her voice is less hoarse now, but still slightly flat, the calm at odds with what she says.

“The Church of Mirth still celebrates the Dark Moons Carnival each sweep. Subjugglators are not known for hunting, but they go out to find themselves some likely candidates and drag back lusii and grubs and the youngest of children of any color they can find. They toss them all in the ring for the darkened moons to decide. It is a time of great merriment for the hunters. Heavy betting rides on their prey.”

You can see it, in your mind, and you did not know, but it does not surprise you. You remember how your injured lusus hid you when you were hunted through the waning light of the thin crescent moons, how he led your howling, laughing pursuers away on a false trail. It is the first time you know that you might not have died _there_ if they had found you. It is the first time that you think it would have been better to have died there than to have eaten of subjugglator bread and blood and poison. You were three sweeps. You could _easily_ have held lusii in your thrall. You could not so easily have pulled yourself from the Church's thrall. 

“Slaughter,” you breathe, and you can smell it.

“Yes. Some sweeps there is no victor as none survive. When the triumphant lusus alone stands or flies above their still living charge, they die in their moment of triumph. And their charge is raised by the Church, without lusus or standard schoolfeeding or any inkling of the world outside the Church, except that it is _sinful_ and must be _cleansed_.

“Kankri and his lusus, fierce and enlightened Porrim, were to be my prey. Others had already been sent, but none returned. The Church is a world of brethren, Rufioh. Belonging. And we all, every troll, we want to _belong_ , we want to be liked, to be loved, to be hated in the right way, to be needed, to be _known_. We are social creatures and the culture of fear is killing us. War will not fix that. It will be worse for quite some time.”

You reach out to hand her your bowl and open your mouth to retort, to tell her that this war is necessary, that it is a waste of your time to reminisce over the past and watch her social experiment with wigglers if she was just going to lecture you on the problematic nature of war when you are needed elsewhere. War is natural. You are a violent people. When every avenue of legal process is closed to you, _you have no choice_. Why won’t she take her damn half empty bowl of tea and let you go? You ignore the fact that you would likely waste just as much time wandering for the exit and that it’s too late to get to another shelter tonight even if you found it. You have a tent. You have your lance. You could do with some zombies about now.

She puts her hand over the bowl, over your hand, and you grind your teeth, but you don’t let it drop. You hiss in frustration. She stares you in the eye.

“The most difficult part will be _after_ we win.” She squeezes your hand, and her grip is strong enough to surprise you, even if something in her eyes tells you that she doesn’t think she’ll live so long.

“You must promise me something, Summoner. We will have to take soldiers and spies, trolls that have fought under pressure and honed themselves to action and paranoia, and we will have to turn them into caretakers of our new world. Some must care for the young orphans, help the next generation grow into a new future without repeating the inherent problems that caused so much pain and repeating cycles of harm. We cannot cull for color or old angers, only crimes whose perpetrators cannot be rehabilitated. We must be impartial. We must be kind. Promise me that you will try to break the _cycle_ , not just the hemospectrum.”

It’s impossible, but somehow you can’t tell her that.

“If you can assist us, this will be as you say, so far as it is within my power to provide,” you return, and if it is more a retort than promise, you think she might forgive you. You have a moment to wonder if it is a blessing that you are more likely to die in battle than end up saddled with wigglers. They’re loud. Argumentative. Messy. Obnoxiously, ridiculously small and fragile. Sorrow, who, far from living up to her name, seems downright cheerful, has doled out cake, the cookies apparently being a ruse, and is currently wiping faces before releasing the clamor into the anterior of the room with its piles of blankets. The brown and the seat-stealing-violet are already building a chair-and-blanket fort.

“You must promise me one more thing, Rufioh.”

You frown at her and she releases your hand, taking your bowl, tipping hers into yours, swirling once, and pouring half back into hers. She hands your bowl back to you and sips her own. You sip, half bemused at all these demands and half scheming all the ways she could aid your efforts despite her age.

“When you stand over the Condesce’s corpse, when you capture her flagship, you must free the Helmsman. His name is Mituna Captor and it is far past time that he had a choice. You must tell our beloved and beloathed that there is nothing to forgive and then you must let him live or die as he decides.”

“Tell him yourself, you wily old codger, when we _win_.” You're not choked up, not with victory or sorrow. You're not. 

She laughs then and tosses the rest of her tea back like a troll in their prime hitting up the local watering holes after a long night.

“Maybe I will. When we win.” She sets the bowl down on a nearby table with a firm click. You don’t think she really believes she’ll live to see him again, any more than she might believe that the Signless will stroll in at any moment or that the Grand Highblood might stop by for a peaceful lunch of tea and pudding. You don’t know a lot about Sufferists, but you lived with them long enough to know that they argue as much as any other trolls. You wonder if it matters that the Great Quadrant Debate has been at least partially revealed.

She sits at the large vacated table with the sigh of someone who has traveled a great distance and is exhausted, a feeling you know all too well as it describes you.

She looks her age for the first time, the line of her spine suddenly fragile. The part of you that is always calculating notes that she would be an easy kill now, just like the part of you that is continuously focused on your next goal, then your next, senses that you’re still negotiating. She gestures you into another chair and you take one against the wall so that you can keep an eye on all the trolls in the room. The last thing you need when you’ve almost got what you want is to react to an incoming threat only to find a surprised wiggler bleeding out under your claws.

Sorrow puts down plates in front of each of you and you avail yourself of a grain and cheese dish with vegetables before you attack a slice of the frosted fruit and nut cake.

Your scouts reported that the Disciple was a mostly harmless old eccentric. Clearly it’s time to do some retraining. Maybe when she’s not on morale duties or sticking her nose in policy, she’d consider counterintelligence. You wonder how much of a network the Sufferists maintain or if they stick to cells to avoid being compromised. Meulin has revealed a lot without really giving you much you can directly use, at least so far. You are confident that you will prevail.

Meulin smiles at you as Sorrow refills your tea bowls psionically and jiggles a whining grub in a sling against her chest. _Shush, shush, shush_ , she exhales. _Thwap, thwap, thwap_ , goes the cleaver she’s wielding against a tuskbeast carcass on the counter.  

“Tell me of your matesprit, Rufioh,” Meulin purrs, and you realize suddenly from the tone that you may have further to go than you had thought.

“Tell me why I should entrust our legacy to someone who tortured and killed our Mother.”

Shit. You wish Aranea _had_ come, you want to _shake_ her. How the hell could she have _forgotten_ to mention that?! Stay calm, Rufioh, she _wants_ to help. It’s a _good_ sign if she’s wary of hypocrisy.  Really.

You force yourself to meet the Disciple’s gaze and that of her… assistant? Heir? Bodyguard?

Sorrow smiles at you, cleaver on the counter again, and while it’s not outright mean, you’re reminded of how long she outwaited the wigglers. _Go ahead_ , her expression says, _explain yourself out of this one_. 

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so maybe trolls don’t have a nun-equivalent, but if one starts with the concept that married to troll-Jesus = nun, then Disciple’s a nun… and so is Psiioniic.


End file.
